BWBS Ep:164 Krampus Christmas

I love a good Christmas story.
The kind where something strange and wonderful happens out in the wilderness. Where the magic of the season reaches places most people never go. Where even the darkest corners of the forest feel touched by something warm and old and meaningful.Over the years, I’ve told you stories like that.

Stories of Sasquatch sightings on snowy December mornings.
Of mysterious gifts left on remote cabin doorsteps.
Of unexplained tracks leading to and from places where no tracks should exist at all.But tonight, friends, I’m not here to warm your heart.Tonight, I’m here to freeze your blood.

South Carolina. 1985.

A young insurance adjuster named Gerald Hutchins inherits a remote cabin deep in the forest from his great-uncle Amos. The old man had lived alone out there for more than twenty years, and the family whispered that he came back from the war… changed. Haunted. Given to muttering in languages no one recognized. Drawing strange symbols he would immediately burn in the fireplace.Gerald decides the cabin would be the perfect place to spend Christmas with his wife, Ellen, and their thirteen-year-old son, Marcus.

A real holiday, he tells them. The kind they used to have before television and convenience took over. Just a family, a fire, and the quiet peace of the winter woods.What Gerald doesn’t tell them is what he found when he first visited the cabin alone.The chains hanging above the fireplace.
The birch switches stained dark with something he didn’t want to examine too closely.
And the mask. A horrible wooden mask with hollow eyes and a grin carved with far too many teeth.He doesn’t tell them about the sound he heard coming from the second floor.

The sound of hooves on hardwood. As Christmas Eve settles in, the temperature drops and the snow begins to fall. And the Hutchins family will learn that some traditions are older than Christianity. Some punishments are older than coal in a stocking. And some things that were meant to stay in the old country followed our ancestors across the ocean—hiding in the shadows of their ships, waiting patiently for the right moment to remind us that the old ways never truly died.

They just learned how to wait.Long before Santa Claus became the jolly gift-giver we know today, the winter solstice was a time of fear as much as celebration in the Alpine regions of Europe. While Saint Nicholas rewarded good children, his dark companion dealt with the rest.

Krampus. Half-goat. Half-demon. All nightmare. A creature with curved horns, a serpentine tongue, chains forged in hellfire, and birch switches for the wicked. A basket on its back to carry its prizes away—down to whatever hell it called home.

Krampusnacht, celebrated on December fifth, saw young men dress as the creature and roam the streets, terrorizing towns. But the oldest stories—the ones whispered long before costumes—spoke of something far older than men in masks. A being that existed before Christianity tried to tame it. A being that still walks the winter forests when nights grow long and the barriers between worlds wear thin.A being that always comes back.

Content Warning:
This episode contains intense horror imagery, supernatural violence, and themes involving harm to a family, including a child. Listener discretion is strongly advised.  This one is not for the faint of heart—and absolutely not for little ones. I’ve spent a long time telling stories about strange things in the woods. Bigfoot encounters. Unexplained phenomena. Creatures that linger just beyond the firelight. Even the scariest of those stories often carry a strange warmth—a sense that whatever’s out there might be mysterious, might be frightening, but isn’t necessarily evil.This story is different. This story is about something very evil.

Something that has been doing terrible things to humanity for a very long time.
Something that doesn’t care about your Christmas spirit, your good intentions, or your prayers.I wanted to tell this story because I think we’ve sanitized our holidays. We’ve forgotten that our ancestors celebrated the winter solstice not just with feasts and gifts—but with rituals meant to protect them from the darkness. They understood something we’ve chosen to forget.The longest night of the year is the longest for a reason.

So as you listen, maybe keep a candle burning.
Maybe check the locks on your doors.
And if you hear something on the roof that sounds a little too heavy to be reindeer…Well. You know what to do.

.Until next time…Sweet dreams.And Merry Christmas. 🎄

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness, Bigfoot,

(00:22):
dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,

(00:46):
and let's head off into the woods.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
If you dare.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Well, well, well, look who decided to join me by
the fire on this cold December night. Pull up a chair,
pour yourself something warm, and let me tell you a
little Christmas story. Now I know what you're thinking. You
tuned in expecting one of my usual tales, maybe a
Bigfoot encounter story to get you in the holiday spirit.
And honestly, I considered it. I really did. I've got

(01:25):
a charming little yarn about a family in Washington State,
who claimed they spotted a sasquatch wearing what appeared to
be a Santa hat trudging through the snow on Christmas
morning back in nineteen seventy eight. The father swore up
and down that the creature was carrying a burlap sack
over its shoulder, and when it noticed them watching from
the kitchen window, it raised one massive hand in what

(01:46):
could only be described as a friendly wave before disappearing
into the tree line. Sweet, right, heartwarming, even the kind
of story that makes you smile and wonder if maybe,
just maybe, even our big hairy friends in the forest
celebrate the season in their own way. I've told stories
like that before, tales of strange lights in the winter sky,

(02:09):
of mysterious gifts left on doorsteps and remote mountain communities,
of unexplained footprints in the snow leading to and from
isolated cabins where children reported seeing something large and gentle
peering through frosted windows on Christmas Eve. Those stories have
their place. They remind us that mystery doesn't always have

(02:29):
to be terrifying, that the unknown can sometimes bring wonder
instead of dread. But tonight, tonight is not that kind
of night. Tonight, I'm going to tell you about something
that happened in the winter of nineteen eighty five, something
that took place in the deep forests of South Carolina,
in a cabin that had stood empty for nearly three

(02:50):
years before a young family decided it would be the
perfect place to spend Christmas. They were wrong, so very
very wrong, because what visit that cabin on Christmas Eve
wasn't jolly old Saint Nick with his bag of presents. No,
what came to that cabin was something far older, something
that existed long before Christianity wrapped its tensil around the

(03:13):
winter solstice and called it Christmas, something that had been
doing its dark work in the forests of Europe for
centuries before the first settlers ever set foot on American soil,
Something that came over with those settlers hiding in the
shadows of their ships, feeding on their fears, waiting for
the right moment to remind humanity that the old ways

(03:34):
never really died. They just learned to be patient. So
settle in, my friends, turn up the lights if you
need to check the locks on your doors, and whatever
you do, don't look out the window, because tonight I'm
going to tell you about the Christmas Eve when Crampus
came calling. The story begins, as so many horror stories do,

(03:55):
with a death in the family. Gerald Hutchins received the
news of great Uncle Amos's passing in the summer of
nineteen eighty five. He hadn't seen the old man in
over a decade, hadn't even thought about him much. If
he was being honest, Amos had always been the black
sheep of the Hutchins family, a strange and solitary figure
who had retreated to a cabin in the South Carolina

(04:17):
wilderness sometime in the early nineteen sixties and had rarely
been heard from since. The family whispered about Amos at
reunions and holiday gatherings. They said he had gone strange
after the war, that he had seen things in the
forests of Germany that had broken something inside him, that
he had come back different, haunted, prone to muttering in

(04:38):
languages no one recognized, and drawing symbols on scraps of
paper that he would immediately burn in the fireplace. Gerald's
father had always dismissed these stories as the usual family gossip,
the kind of embellishments that grow around anyone who chooses
to live differently. Amos was just a hermit.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
He would say.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Some men come back from war wanting to be alone.
There was nothing more to it than that. But Gerald
remembered something his father had said once, late at night,
after too many beers at a family barbecue. He remembered
his father's voice going quiet, his eyes getting distant as
he recalled the last time he'd visited Amos at that
cabin in the woods. He said the old man had

(05:19):
grabbed his arm with surprising strength and had pulled him close.
He said Amos's breath had smelled like whiskey and something else,
something bitter and medicinal. And he said Amos had whispered
four words that had haunted him ever since. It knows
we're here. Gerald's father had never gone back to that cabin.
He had never spoken to Amos again, and when the

(05:41):
news came that the old man had died alone in
his bed, apparently of natural causes, Jerald's father had refused
to attend the funeral. But the cabin was part of
the estate, and because Jerald was the closest living relative
willing to deal with the paperwork, the property fell to him.
Jerald was thirty four years old. That summer, he worked

(06:02):
as an insurance adjuster in Columbia, a job he found
mind numbingly dull, but which paid well enough to support
his wife, Ellen and their son Marcus. They lived in
a modest, three bedroom house in a suburb that looked
identical to every other suburb in America, and they spent
their weekends doing the same things every other family in
that suburb did, backyard barbecues, little league games, church on

(06:26):
Sunday mornings. It was a good life, a safe life,
the kind of life that Gerald's parents had never had,
and the kind of life he was determined to give
his own family. But there was something else in Gerald,
something he rarely acknowledged even to himself. A restlessness, a
sense that there had to be more to existence than

(06:46):
quarterly reports and mortgage payments and watching the same television
shows every night while the years ticked away. When he
first saw the cabin in the photographs the estate lawyer
sent him, something stirred in his chest, something that felt
almost like recognition. The cabin was isolated, certainly. The nearest
town was almost twenty miles away, and the property itself

(07:08):
was surrounded by hundreds of acres of dense forest. But
it was beautiful in a rugged, untamed way, the kind
of place where a man could breathe, the kind of
place where a family could escape the noise and chaos
of modern life, if only for a little while. Gerald
made the drive down to see it in person on
a weekend in early September. He went alone, telling Ellen

(07:30):
he needed to assess the property's condition before they decided
whether to sell it or keep it. But the truth
was he wanted to see it for himself first. He
wanted to feel whatever it was that had drawn his
great uncle to this place and kept him there for
over two decades. The road to the cabin was barely
a road at all, more like a suggestion of a

(07:50):
path carved through the wilderness by someone who hadn't wanted
to be found. Gerald sedan, bounced and scraped along the
rutted track for almost forty five minutes before the trees
finally parted to reveal a small clearing, and there it was.
The cabin was larger than he had expected from the photographs,
two stories built from logs that had weathered to a

(08:11):
dark gray over the years. A wide porch wrapped around
the front and one side, and a stone chimney rose
from the roof like a finger pointing accusingly at the sky.
The windows were dark, many of them covered with heavy
curtains that hadn't been opened in years. Gerald sat in
his car for a long moment, just looking at the place.

(08:32):
He couldn't explain the feeling that came over him. It
wasn't fear, exactly. It was more like the sensation of
being watched, of being evaluated, as if the cabin itself
was taking his measure and deciding whether or not he
was worthy of entering. He shook off the feeling and
got out of the car. The air was different here,
cleaner certainly, but also heavier, somehow dense, with the smell

(08:56):
of pine and rotting leaves, and something else underneath it all,
something animal, something that made the hair on the back
of his neck stand at attention. Gerald walked up the
porch steps, slowly, noting the way the boards creaked under
his weight. The front door was unlocked, of course, it
was who was going to rob a place this far
from anywhere. The inside of the cabin was exactly what

(09:19):
he had expected, and nothing like it. At the same time,
the furniture was old but well made, covered in sheets
that had turned gray with dust. The walls were lined
with bookshelves, and the books that filled them were in
languages Jerald didn't recognize German, certainly, but also something older,
something that looked almost like Latin but wasn't quite right.

(09:42):
The fireplace dominated the main room, a massive stone construction
that could have heated a space three times this size.
Above the mantle hung a collection of items that made
Gerald's breath catch in his throat. Chains old and rusted
but still solid, heavy iron chains with manacles attached, the

(10:02):
kind that might have been used to restrain a prisoner
or an animal. Beside the chains hung a collection of
switches and birch rods, their surfaces stained dark with something
Jerald didn't want to think about too carefully. And in
the center of it all, mounted on a wooden plaque
like a hunting trophy, was a mask. It was carved
from dark wood, maybe oak or walnut, and it depicted

(10:25):
a face that Gerald had never seen before, but somehow
recognized on an instinctive level, a face that was almost
human but stretched wrong. The nose was too long, curving
downward like a beak. The eyes were hollow sockets that
seemed to follow him as he moved around the room,
and the mouth was twisted into a grin that contained

(10:46):
far too many teeth. Jerald stood in front of that
mask for a long time. He told himself he should
take it down. He told himself he should throw it
in the fireplace and burn it along with everything else
in this god forsaken place. He told himself he should
get back in his car and drive away and never
think about this cabin again. Instead, he reached out and

(11:07):
touched the mask's cheek. The wood was warm, not room
temperature warm, but blood warm, the warmth of living flesh.
Jerald jerked his hand back as if he had been burned.
He stumbled backward, nearly tripping over a sheet covered chair,
his heart hammering in his chest so hard he could
feel it in his temples. And then he heard it,

(11:29):
a sound from somewhere above him, from the second floor
of the cabin, a sound like hoofs on hard wood.
Jerald ran. He didn't remember making the decision to flee.
One moment he was standing in the main room staring
up at the ceiling, and the next he was in
his car, gunning the engine tearing back down that rutted
excuse for a road, so fast that he was certain

(11:51):
he was going to wrap himself around a tree. He
made it back to the main road, and then to
the highway, and then all the way home to Columbia
without stop once. He didn't tell Ellen about what had happened.
He didn't tell anyone. He told himself it had been
his imagination, a combination of the strange atmosphere and the
unsettling decorations, and the stories his father had told him

(12:14):
about crazy old Uncle Amos. That was all. There was
nothing supernatural about an old cabin in the woods. There
was nothing to be afraid of. Three months later, Gerald
suggested to his wife that they spend Christmas at the cabin.
Gerald didn't tell anyone about the mask or the sound
of hoofs on the second floor. He didn't tell anyone

(12:34):
about the way the cabin had felt alive around him,
watching him, testing him. He went home to Columbia, and
he went back to work, and he told himself over
and over again that it had been nothing that old
houses made strange sounds, that his imagination had simply gotten
the better of him in an unfamiliar environment. But something
had changed in Gerald Hutchins, something that his wife noticed,

(12:56):
even if she couldn't quite name it. He was distracted,
now prone to staring off into space for long minutes
at a time. He had started researching things on his
lunch breaks at the library, strange things, things about Alpine
folklore and Germanic traditions, and creatures from the Old Country
that parents used to frighten their children with before the

(13:17):
world became too modern for such superstitions. He had learned
about Crampus, not the sanitized version that occasionally appeared in
novelty Christmas cards, the real version, the ancient version, the
creature that had been terrifying European villages for centuries before
anyone had ever heard of Santa Claus. Gerald read accounts

(13:37):
of Crampus knocked, celebrations gone wrong, of children who had
disappeared during the festivities, of families found dead in their
homes on Christmas morning, with expressions of absolute terror frozen
on their faces. He read about the chains the creature carried,
forged in hell fire, used to bind the wicked and
drag them down to damnation. He read about the switches

(13:58):
made from birch oaked in holy water by some accounts,
and in blood by others, used to beat the naughty
children before they were carried away. He read about the
basket on the creature's back, the basket that was always hungry,
always empty, no matter how many screaming children were stuffed inside.
And he read about the masks. In some traditions, the

(14:19):
crampest masks were carved by the creature itself, made from
the bones and skin of its victims, worn as trophies
of past hunts. In other traditions, the masks were portals,
doorways that allowed the creature to see into our world
from whatever dark dimension it normally inhabited. The masks watched
and waited, the story said, they called to their master.

(14:43):
They marked the homes that would be visited when the
winter solstice came. Gerald had read all of this, and
he had convinced himself that it was nonsense, fairy tales,
the kind of primitive superstition that had no place in
modern America. His great uncle had clearly been disturbed, driven
mad by his years of isolation, and the mask above

(15:03):
the fireplace was just a piece of folk art, nothing more.
Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
after these messages. But somehow, despite all of his rational explanations,
Gerald couldn't stop thinking about the cabin, couldn't stop dreaming
about it, couldn't stop feeling deep in the marrow of

(15:24):
his bones, that something there was waiting for him to
come back, that something there was calling him. Ellen had
her doubts about the plan. She expressed them repeatedly in
the weeks leading up to Christmas, pointing out all the
sensible reasons why spending the holidays in an isolated cabin
with no phone, no television, and questionable heating was a

(15:45):
bad idea. What if Marcus got sick, What if there
was an emergency, What if they ran out of food,
or the car broke down, or any of a hundred
other things that could go wrong when you were twenty
miles from the nearest town in the middle of December.
But Gerald was persuasive. He talked about the magic of
a real Christmas, the kind they used to have before

(16:05):
everyone got so dependent on technology and convenience. He talked
about cutting down their own tree and making popcorn strings
and telling stories by the fire. He talked about how
good it would be for Marcus to experience nature, real nature,
not the manicured parks and carefully maintained hiking trails they
usually visited, and eventually Ellen agreed. Marcus was thirteen that year,

(16:29):
caught in that awkward space between childhood and adolescence where
everything his parents suggested was automatically suspect. He wasn't thrilled
about the idea of spending Christmas without his atari, or
his friends, or the television specials he looked forward to
every year. But there was something in his father's eyes
when he talked about the cabin, a excitement that Marcus

(16:50):
hadn't seen in a long time, and despite his complaints,
some part of him was curious about this mysterious inheritance
that had dropped into their lives. They left Columbia on
the morning of December twenty third. The weather had been
mild for most of the month, but the radio was
warning of a cold front moving in from the north.

(17:10):
Temperatures were expected to drop well below freezing by Christmas Day,
with a possibility of snow. Gerald had prepared thoroughly. The
back of the station wagon was loaded with enough food
and supplies to last them through New Years if necessary.
He had brought extra blankets, flashlights, batteries, a first aid kit,
and several containers of gasoline for the generator that powered

(17:32):
the cabin's few electrical outlets. He had even brought a
small chainsaw for cutting firewood, though we hoped there would
be enough already stacked beside the cabin to see them through.
The drive took longer than expected. The roads were good
until they turned off the main highway, but then the
pavement gave way to gravel, and the gravel eventually gave
way to dirt. The track that led to the cabin

(17:55):
was even more overgrown than Gerald remembered, and he had
to stop twice to clear fall in branches from the path.
They arrived at the cabin just as the sun was
beginning to set. The light was wrong, that was the
first thing Gerald noticed as they pulled into the clearing.
The sunset should have been painting the sky in shades
of orange and pink and gold, but instead the light

(18:16):
had a sickly quality to it, a pale and washed
out yellow that made everything look slightly diseased. The shadows
cast by the trees seemed too long, too dark, stretching
across the snow dusted ground. Like grasping fingers. Ellen's first
reaction was silence. Gerald watched her face carefully as she
took in the building, looking for signs of approval or disgust.

(18:40):
He couldn't read her expression. She simply sat in the
passenger seat, staring through the windshield at the cabin and
the forest that surrounded it, her hands folded in her lap.
Gerald noticed that her knuckles had gone white, and he
wondered if she was feeling the same thing he was,
that sense of being observed, that feeling of stepping into
a place that didn't want them there. The cabin itself

(19:03):
looked worse than Gerald remembered. The logs that made up
its walls had seemed merely weathered in September, but now
they looked almost rotted, the dark gray wood streaked with
something that might have been moled, or might have been
something else entirely. The windows were black mirrors that reflected
the dying light without revealing anything of what lay within.

(19:24):
And the porch, that wide porch that had seemed almost
welcoming before, now looked like a mouth, a dark, gaping mouth,
waiting to swallow anyone foolish enough to step inside. Gerald
shook off the thought. It was just a cabin, just
wood and glass and stone, just the inheritance of a
crazy old man who had lived alone too long. There

(19:46):
was nothing supernatural about it. There was nothing to be
afraid of, he almost believed himself. Marcus was less reserved.
He was out of the car before his father had
even turned off the engine, running up the porch steps
and pressing his face again one of the windows, trying
to see inside. Gerald wanted to call out to him,
wanted to tell him to come back, but something stopped him,

(20:08):
some reluctance to break the silence that had settled over
the clearing like a shroud. The cabin was different in winter,
starker somehow, its dark wood standing out sharply against the
white birch trees that surrounded the clearing. The porch was
covered in a layer of fallen leaves that no one
had bothered to sweep away, and the windows were even

(20:28):
darker than Gerald remembered, their curtains drawn tight against the
fading light. Jerald had made arrangements to have the power
turned on and some basic cleaning done before their arrival,
but as he climbed the porch steps and pushed open
the front door, he realized that whoever he had hired
had done the bare minimum. The sheets had been removed
from the furniture, and someone had swept the floors, but

(20:52):
the cabin still had an abandoned feeling to it, a
sense of long emptiness that no amount of quick tiding
could erase. The mask was still there, hanging above the fireplace.
Jerald had hoped someone might have taken it down. He
had even considered asking for it to be removed specifically,
but something had stopped him, some reluctance he couldn't explain.

(21:14):
Ellen saw the mask immediately. She walked into the main
room and stopped dead, her eyes fixed on that twisted
wooden face, with its empty sockets and its too many teeth.
What is that? She wanted to know? Gerald told her
he wasn't sure. Some old European folk art, maybe something
his great uncle had picked up during the war. He

(21:35):
tried to sound casual about it, but he could hear
the false note in his own voice. Ellen continued to
stare at the mask for a long moment. Then she
turned to look at her husband, and there was something
in her eyes that Jerald didn't like, something that looked
almost like recognition. She asked if they could take it down.
Jerald said he would, but not tonight. Tonight they needed

(21:57):
to focus on getting settled, in, making the place comfortable,
building a fire to ward off the cold that was
already creeping in through the walls. He would deal with
the mask tomorrow, tomorrow, he promised. Ellen didn't argue. She
simply nodded and turned away, and Gerald could see the
tension in her shoulders as she began unpacking their supplies. Marcus, meanwhile,

(22:20):
had discovered the stairs to the second floor. Gerald heard
him calling from above, his voice echoing through the cabin's
empty spaces, talking about all the rooms up there, and
the old books and the weird drawings on the walls.
Gerald felt a chill run down his spine that had
nothing to do with the temperature. He had forgotten about
the drawings when he had visited in September. He had

(22:41):
gone upstairs only briefly, just long enough to confirm that
the rooms were empty, that there was nothing valuable that
needed to be secured. He had glanced at the walls,
had registered the markings there, but he hadn't really looked
at them. Now, climbing the stairs. With his heart beating
a little too fast, he forced himself to look. The
drawings covered almost every surface, the walls, the ceiling, even

(23:06):
parts of the floor. They were done in what looked
like charcoal, though some appeared to have been made with
something darker and redder that Gerald didn't want to think
about too carefully. Most of the drawings were of the
same figure, a tall, twisted shape with horns rising from
its head and legs that bent backward like a goat's.
In some drawings, the figure was carrying chains, in others

(23:29):
it held a bundle of switches or birch rods, and
still others it was stuffing something small and screaming into
a basket on its back, And in all of them,
without exception, the figure was grinning. Marcus was standing in
the middle of one of the bedrooms, turning slowly in
a circle, taking in the drawings that surrounded him on
all sides. He asked his father what all this stuff was.

(23:53):
Gerald wanted to lie. He wanted to say he had
no idea, that his great uncle had been crazy, that
the drawings meant nothing, But looking at his son's face,
seeing the fear that was already beginning to take root. There,
he found he couldn't do it. He told Marcus about Crampis.
He told him about the old Alpine traditions, the ones

(24:13):
that existed long before Christmas as they knew it. He
told him about how in those ancient times, the winter
solstice was a time of fear as well as celebration,
a time when the barrier between worlds grew thin, and
things that normally stayed hidden came out to walk among humans.
He told him about the figure that traveled with Saint Nicholas,

(24:33):
the dark counterpart to the jolly gift giver. While Nicholas
rewarded the good children with presents and sweets, his companion
dealt with the bad ones, the naughty, the wicked, the
ones who had earned punishment instead of presents. Crampis Gerald explained,
was that companion a demon or a devil, or something
older still, depending on who you asked. A creature with

(24:57):
the horns of a ram, the hoofs of a god,
and a tongue that hung down past its chin. It
carried chains because it had once been bound, imprisoned in
hell or somewhere worse, and it never wanted to forget
what it meant to be trapped. It carried switches to
beat the bad children, and it carried a basket to
stuff the men and carry them away back to whatever

(25:19):
dark place it called home. Marcus listened to all of
this with wide eyes. When his father was finished, he
asked if Crampis was real. Gerald told him no, of
course not. It was just a story, a legend away
for parents in the old Country to scare their children
into behaving like the Boogeyman or the monster under the bed.

(25:41):
There was no such thing as Crampis. There were no demons,
no devils, nothing to be afraid of. But even as
he said the words, Gerald felt the lie sticking in
his throat, because, somewhere deep inside him, in a place
he didn't like to acknowledge, he wasn't sure. He wasn't
sure at all. The cold front arrived faster than expected.

(26:02):
By the morning of December twenty fourth, the temperature had
dropped to well below freezing and a bitter wind was
howling through the trees that surrounded the cabin. Gerald had
to make three trips out to the woodpile to keep
the fire going, each time returning with frost in his
beard and numbness in his fingers. Ellen kept busy in
the kitchen, preparing the Christmas Eve dinner she had planned.

(26:25):
The cabin had a wood burning stove that she eventually
figured out how to use, and soon the smell of
roasting ham and baking bread began to fill the small space,
mingling with the smoke from the fireplace and creating something
that felt almost cozy. Almost, But the mask was still there,
hanging above the mantle, and no matter where Ellen positioned

(26:46):
herself in the room, she could feel its empty eyes
watching her. Marcus spent most of the day exploring the cabin,
despite his mother's warnings to stay inside where it was warm.
He found boxes of old photographs in one of the clocks,
pictures of people he didn't recognize, standing in front of
buildings he had never seen. He found collections of strange

(27:07):
coins and medals, some of them bearing symbols that made
his stomach turn when he looked at them too closely.
And he found a journal hidden beneath a loose floorboard
in one of the upstairs bedrooms, written in his great
great uncle's cramped and barely legible handwriting. Marcus brought the
journal downstairs and showed it to his father, who took
it with trembling hands and began to read. The journal

(27:30):
spanned several decades, beginning in the early nineteen sixties, when
Amos had first moved to the cabin. The early entries
were mundane enough, documenting the work of making the place habitable,
the challenges of living so far from civilization, the small
pleasures of a solitary life in nature. But as the
years went on, the entries grew stranger. Amos began writing

(27:53):
about dreams, nightmares, really visions of something hunting through the
winter forests, something with horn and hoofs and a smile
that contained too many teeth. He wrote about hearing sounds
at night, footsteps on the porch, something heavy dragging itself
across the roof. He wrote about finding tracks in the
snow around the cabin, tracks that looked almost like those

(28:15):
of a large goat, but that were far too big,
far too deep, as if whatever had made them weigh
several hundred pounds. And he wrote about the Christmas of
nineteen seventy two, the year when he finally saw it.
He had been gathering wood from the pile beside the cabin,
working quickly in the failing light of Christmas Eve afternoon.
He had heard a sound behind him, a sound like

(28:37):
chains rattling, and he had turned to find the creature
standing at the edge of the clearing. It was tall,
Amos wrote, taller than any man, seven feet at least
maybe eight. Its body was covered in dark fur, matted
and filthy, and its legs bent backward at the knee,
like the legs of a goat. Great curving horns rose

(28:59):
from its head, and its eyes, those horrible yellow eyes,
seemed to glow in the twilight, like embers from a
dying fire. It had watched him for a long moment,
Amos wrote, just watched, not moving, not breathing, while he
stood frozen with an armload of firewood and his heart
trying to hammer its way out of his chest. And

(29:20):
then it had smiled. It had smiled with a mouth
that seemed to split its face in half, revealing rows
of teeth that were long and sharp and blackened, as
if they had been charred by hell fire itself. Amos
had dropped the wood and run for the cabin. He
had slammed the door behind him and locked it, and
pushed every piece of furniture he could find against it,

(29:41):
and he had huddled by the fire all night long,
listening to the sound of hoofs on the porch and
something heavy testing the door. The creature had left by morning,
but it had left something behind, a gift wrapped in
what looked like human skin and tied with a ribbon
of braided hair. Stay tuned for more backwoods big stories.
We'll be back after these messages. Amos never wrote what

(30:06):
was inside that gift. He never wrote about whether he
opened it or not, or what he had done with it. Afterward,
the entry simply stopped mid sentence, as if the old
man had been unable to continue. The next entry in
the journal was dated almost three years later, and it
contained only a single line, written in letters so shaky
they were almost illegible. It comes back every year. It

(30:30):
always comes back. Gerald set down the journal and looked
at his son. Marcus was pale, his eyes wide, his
lower lip trembling slightly. Despite his best efforts to appear brave.
Gerald told him not to worry. He told him that
his great uncle had clearly been unwell, that living alone
in the wilderness for so long could do strange things

(30:52):
to a person's mind. He told him that there was
nothing in those woods but deer and rabbits and maybe
a few bears, nothing that could hurt them, nothing that
even knew they were there. But as he spoke, Gerald
became aware of something, a silence that seemed to press
against the walls of the cabin, heavy and expectant, a

(31:12):
silence where there should have been wind. He walked to
the window and pulled back the curtain. The wind had stopped.
The trees that had been swaying and creaking just minutes
before now stood perfectly still, their bare branches motionless against
a sky that had turned the color of old bone.
And the light was wrong, somehow, dimmer than it should

(31:33):
have been at this hour, as if something was drawing
the brightness out of the air itself. Ellen called from
the kitchen, asking what was wrong. Gerald let the curtain
fall back into place. Nothing, he said, Everything was fine,
just a change in the weather. He didn't mention the
tracks he had seen in the snow at the edge
of the clearing, the deep, cloven tracks that hadn't been

(31:55):
there that morning. He didn't mention the figure he'd seen
for just a moment between the trees, the tall, horned
figure that had seemed to be watching the cabin with
eyes that burned like dying coals. He didn't mention any
of it. Instead, he helped Ellen set the table for dinner,
and he smiled at his son's jokes, and he pretended
that everything was normal, that this was just another Christmas Eve,

(32:18):
that the growing knot of dread in his stomach was
nothing but indigestion from eating too many of Ellen's cookies.
They sat down to eat as the last light faded
from the sky, and somewhere out in the darkness, something
began to move toward the cabin. The power went out
at seven forty three. Jerald had been watching the clock
on the mantel, one of the few items in the

(32:39):
cabin that actually seemed to belong to the modern era.
It was a battery operated digital clock that Amos must
have purchased sometime in the late seventies, its red numbers
glowing softly in the dim light of the cabin. Jerald
had been watching those numbers, watching the minutes tick by,
telling himself that every minute that passed was a minute

(32:59):
closer morning, a minute closer to daylight, a minute closer
to the moment when they could pack up the car
and leave this place behind forever. Seven forty two became
seven forty three, and then the lights went out. One moment,
the cabin was filled with the warm glow of electric
lights and the soft hum of the generator, and the

(33:20):
next they were plunged into a darkness so complete that
for a moment, none of them could breathe. It was
the kind of darkness that city people never experience, the
kind of absolute blackness that exists only in places far
from street lights and highways and the constant ambient illumination
of civilization, the kind of darkness where your eyes strain

(33:40):
and strain and never adjust because there's simply no light
to adjust to. Gerald fumbled for the flashlight he had
placed on the table beside his plate, having learned from
his September visit that the cabin's electricity was not to
be trusted. The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating his
wife's face his son's face, both of them frozen in

(34:02):
expressions of shock that mirrored his own. In that brief
moment of flashlight illumination, Gerald saw something else, just a glimpse,
just a fraction of a second, But it burned itself
into his memory with the permanence of a brand. He
saw the mask above the fireplace, and he saw that
its expression had changed. The grin, that horrible too many

(34:25):
teeth grin had grown wider. The empty eye socket seemed deeper, darker,
more alive, and for just that instant, just that fraction
of a heartbeat, Gerald could have sworn he saw something
moving inside those sockets, something looking back at him. Then
he blinked, and the mask was just a mask again,

(34:46):
and he told himself it had been a trick of
the light, a shadow thrown by the flashlight beam, nothing more.
Ellen asked what happened. Jerald said he didn't know, Probably
just the generator running out of fuel. He had filled
it that afternoon, but maybe he hadn't filled it enough.
He would go outside and check. His voice sounded strange

(35:06):
to his own ears, too calm to controled, like a
man who was using every ounce of will power he
had to keep from screaming. Marcus asked if he could
come with him. Gerald started to say no, started to
say it was too cold outside and Marcus should stay
here where it was safe, but something in his son's
eyes stopped him. A fear that went beyond the simple darkness,

(35:29):
a fear that said being left alone in this cabin,
even with his mother, was not something Marcus was willing
to do. And maybe, if Gerald was being honest with himself,
he didn't want to go out there alone either. So
Gerald nodded, and he handed Marcus one of the other flashlights,
and together they put on their coats and their gloves
and their hats, and they stepped out onto the porch.

(35:51):
The cold hit them like a physical blow. It was
far worse than it had been that afternoon, a bitter,
biting cold that seemed to reach through their layers of
clothing and wrap its fingers around their bones. This wasn't
natural cold, Gerald thought. This was something else. This was
the kind of cold that preceded something terrible, the kind

(36:12):
of cold that announced the arrival of something that had
no business existing in the natural world. Gerald's breath froze
in the air before him, forming clouds of ice crystals
that sparkled in the beam of his flashlight. The snow
was falling harder now, thick flakes that seemed to absorb
the flashlight beams, limiting visibility to just a few feet
in any direction. The world beyond the porch had become

(36:36):
a white void, a blank canvas onto which anything might
be painted. The generator was housed in a small shed
about thirty feet from the cabin. Gerald and Marcus made
their way toward it, their boots crunching in the snow
that had begun to fall while they were eating dinner.
Large flakes drifted down from the darkness above, landing on
their shoulders and their hats, and immediately beginning to melt.

(37:00):
Gerald reached the shed and pulled open the door. He
shone his flashlight inside and felt his stomach drop. The
generator wasn't just out of fuel. It had been destroyed.
Something had torn the machine apart, ripping wires and breaking
components and scattering pieces across the interior of the shed.
The fuel tank had been punctured, and the smell of

(37:20):
gasoline was thick in the air, mixing with another smell
that Gerald didn't recognize at first. Then he did recognize it,
and he felt the blood drain from his face. It
smelled like a barnyard, like goats and sheep and horses,
and something else underneath, something musky and rotten and utterly wrong.
Marcus was saying something, asking what happened, asking who did this?

(37:44):
But Gerald couldn't answer because he had just noticed something else.
Marks on the walls of the shed, deep gouges in
the wood, as if something with long, sharp claws had
been raking at the surface, and above the gouges, burned
into the wood itself was a symbol, a circle with
horns rising from the top, and inside the circle a

(38:05):
grinning face. Gerald grabbed his son's arm and pulled him
away from the shed. He told him they needed to
get back to the cabin now, right now. They ran.
They made it maybe halfway across the clearing when Marcus
suddenly stopped, yanking his arm free from his father's grip
and pointing at something in the darkness beyond. Gerald turned

(38:27):
to look. At first, he couldn't see anything, just trees
and snow and the endless darkness of the forest at night.
But then his eyes adjusted and he realized that one
of the shapes between the trees wasn't a tree at all.
It was standing perfectly still watching them, a tall figure
easily seven feet or more, with great curving shapes rising

(38:49):
from its head that could only be horns. Its body
was covered in something dark, fur or hair or something worse,
and its legs were bent at angles that no human
leg could bend, and its eyes, its eyes were glowing
yellow like fire, like the embers of a flame that
had been burning since the beginning of time. They fixed

(39:12):
on Gerald and Marcus with an intelligence that was ancient
and terrible and completely without mercy. For a moment, no
one moved. The creature stood there at the edge of
the clearing, watching, waiting, and Gerald and his son stood
in the middle of the yard with their flashlights and
their terror and the absolute certainty that they were about
to die. Then the creature smiled that smile, that horrible,

(39:37):
impossible smile that seemed to split its face in half
and revealed teeth that were black and long and sharp,
teeth that were clearly designed for one purpose, and one
purpose only, tearing flesh from bone. Gerald grabbed Marcus again
and ran for the cabin. He didn't look back. He
couldn't look back, because looking back would mean seeing that

(39:59):
thing start to move, and if he saw that, if
he actually witnessed it coming for them, he knew his
legs would stop working and his heart would stop beating,
and he would simply collapse in the snow and wait
for those black teeth to find him. They reached the porch,
Jerald threw open the door. They tumbled inside, and he
slammed the door behind them, and threw the dead bolt

(40:20):
and shoved his back against the wood, as if his
weight alone could keep out whatever was coming. Ellen was there,
a candle in her hand, asking what was wrong, asking
why they were running, asking what had happened to the generator.
Gerald couldn't speak. He could only stand there against the door,
his chest heaving, his heart pounding, his mind, trying desperately

(40:42):
to process what he had just seen. It was Marcus
who finally found his voice. It's real, he said, Crampis,
It's real, and it's here. The next hour was a
blur of activity and terror. Jerald pushed every piece of
furniture he could move against the front door, just as
his great uncle had done all those years ago. The

(41:03):
heavy oak dining table went first, then the couch, then
the armchairs, then anything else that had weight and substance.
He worked with the frantic energy of a man who
knows that what he's doing is probably useless, but who
cannot bring himself to simply wait for death. Ellen gathered
candles and placed them throughout the cabin, their flickering light

(41:24):
casting dancing shadows on the walls that seemed to move
with a life of their own. Every time Gerald glanced
at those shadows, he thought he saw shapes in them,
horn shapes, twisted shapes, shapes that shouldn't exist in any
sane and rational world. Marcus sat in the corner of
the main room, his knees drawn up to his chest,

(41:47):
his eyes fixed on the mask above the fireplace, as
if expecting it to come alive at any moment. He
was shaking. Gerald noticed not from the cold, though the
temperature inside the cabin was dropping steadily that the fire
was providing the only heat. He was shaking from something deeper,
something primal, the kind of terror that exists in the

(42:08):
oldest part of the human brain, the part that remembers
what it was like to huddle in caves while predators
stalked the darkness outside. The wind had returned, howling around
the cabin with a fury that seemed almost personal. It
screamed through the gaps in the logs and rattled the
windows in their frames, and seemed to speak in a
language that was almost but not quite comprehensible. Snow pelted

(42:31):
the windows with a sound like thousands of tiny fists
demanding entry, and beneath it all barely audible, but definitely
there was another sound. The sound of something walking around
the cabin, heavy footsteps, slow and deliberate, the creak of
boards on the porch, the scrape of something sharp against
the logs of the walls, and every now and then

(42:54):
a sound that might have been breathing, deep wet breathing,
like a massive bellow, pumping air in and out of
lungs that were far too large to belong to anything natural.
Gerald had found his great uncle's shotgun in a closet
on the second floor. It was old, but still functional,
a double barreled twelve gage that must have been manufactured

(43:15):
sometime in the nineteen forties. The wood of the stock
was worn smooth by decades of handling, and there were
scratches on the barrel that looked almost like claw marks.
Gerald tried not to think about that. He focused instead
on loading the weapon, on finding the shells in the
box beside it, on forcing his shaking hands to cooperate
long enough to get two rounds into the chambers. He

(43:38):
didn't know if a shotgun could kill what was out there.
He didn't know if anything mortal could harm something that
had been haunting humanity since before the birth of Christ.
But holding the weapon made him feel slightly less helpless,
and right now, that was all he could ask for.
The footsteps stopped. The silence that followed was somehow worse
than the sounds had been, just against the walls of

(44:01):
the cabin, like a physical force, heavy and expectant. For
a long moment, there was nothing only the wind and
the snow and the pounding of three hearts that were
all beating far too fast. Then something hit the door.
Not a knock, not a polite request for entry, a hit,
a blow that shook the entire cabin and sent dust

(44:22):
raining down from the rafters. The furniture Gerald had piled
against the door shifted several inches. Ellen screamed, Marcus curled
into a tighter ball, and began to cry. Jerald raised
the shotgun and pointed it at the door, his finger
on the trigger, waiting for whatever was going to happen next.
Another hit, harder, this time, A crack appeared in one

(44:44):
of the boards, and then a sound came from outside,
a sound that shouldn't have been possible. A voice. It
was speaking in a language Jerald didn't recognize. German maybe,
or something older, something guttural and harsh, filled with a
malice that went beyond anything human. Stay tuned for more
Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The

(45:09):
words seemed to crawl into his ears and burrow into
his brain, carrying images with them, images of punishment, of torment,
of things being done to screaming children in dark places
where no one could hear them cry. Gerald fired through
the door. The blast was deafening in the enclosed space
of the cabin. Ellen screamed again, and Marcus covered his ears,

(45:32):
and for a moment there was nothing but the ringing
in Gerald's ears and the smoke curling from the barrel
of the shotgun. Then laughter, deep rumbling laughter that seemed
to come from everywhere at once, from outside the door,
and from the walls, and from beneath the floor, and
from inside Gerald's own head. Laughter that said the shotgun
had been amusing, that it had been a cute little toy,

(45:54):
that it had made the creature feel something it hadn't
felt in a very long time. It had made it
feel entertained. The hitting stopped. The footsteps resumed circling the
cabin again, faster. Now almost excited, Jerald tracked the sound
with the shotgun, following it from the front of the
cabin to the side, to the back, to the other side,

(46:16):
and around again. The creature was toying with them, playing
with its food before the feast. Then a new sound
from above, something on the roof. Gerald's blood ran cold.
He looked up at the ceiling, at the wooden boards
that were all that separated them from whatever was up there,
and he watched in horror as those boards began to bend.

(46:38):
Something heavy was pressing down on them, testing their strength.
Looking for a way in the chimney, Jerald spun toward
the fireplace, where the fire was still burning, where the
smoke was still rising, where the only opening in the
cabin large enough for something to fit through waited. Like
an invitation, He ran to the hearth and threw more

(46:59):
wood on the fire. He didn't care if he burned
the whole cabin down. He didn't care about anything except
keeping that thing from coming down the chimney. Like some
hellish perversion of Santa Claus. The fire roared higher, and
for a moment Gerald thought it had worked. He thought
the flames would be enough to keep the creature at bay.
Then something dropped into the fire, not the creature itself,

(47:22):
something smaller, something that had once been round but was
now misshapen, melted by the flames even as it fell.
A bell, a small, tarnished bell, the kind that might
hang from a jesture's cap or a fool's scepter, the
kind that might also hang from the chains of something
ancient and evil. The bell didn't melt, it didn't burn.

(47:44):
It simply sat in the flames, and as Gerald watched,
it began to ring, a thin, high sound, almost delicate,
almost musical. And with each ring, the candles in the
cabin flickered, first one, then another, than all of them
at once, as if an invisible hand was passing over
their flames. One by one, they went out. The darkness

(48:08):
closed in like a fist, and in that darkness Gerald
heard the front door splinter and break. What happened next
is pieced together from fragments from the sounds that echoed
through the cabin and the glimpses caught in the dying
light of the fire, and the screams that seemed to
go on forever. Some of what I'm about to tell
you comes from the official reports filed after the incident.

(48:31):
Some of it comes from the journal entries Gerald made
in the years that followed, scribbling frantically in notebooks that
the doctors at the psychiatric facility would later confiscate and
file away. And some of it comes from other sources,
sources I'm not going to name, sources that have their
own reasons for knowing what happened in that cabin on
Christmas Eve. The creature came through the door like a storm.

(48:55):
Not through the doorway, mind you, through the door itself.
The wood explain loaded inward, sending splinters flying like shrapnel.
The furniture Gerald had piled against it scattered like children's toys,
the heavy oak table tumbling and over end, the armchairs
crashing against the walls with enough force to shatter their frames.

(49:15):
Gerald heard Ellen screaming his name, heard Marcus crying for
his mother, heard sounds that might have been words in
a language that existed before humanity learned to speak. He
tried to fire the shotgun. He really did. He raised
it toward the shape in the doorway, toward the massive
dark form that seemed to absorb the light rather than
reflect it. And he tried to squeeze the trigger, but

(49:38):
his hands weren't working right, his fingers weren't obeying his commands.
It was as if the creature's presence had short circuited,
something in his nervous system, had broken the connection between
his brain and his body. Before he could pull the trigger,
something hard and heavy struck him across the face and
sent him sprawling. The blow should have killed him. He

(49:59):
knew that even as he was falling. He knew it
with the calm certainty of a man who has accepted
that death has come for him. Whatever had hit him
had hit him with the force of a sledgehammer, had
connected with his jaw and his cheekbone and the side
of his skull with enough power to shatter bone and
pulp brain matter. But Gerald didn't die. He hit the
floor and tasted blood, felt teeth rattling loose in his mouth,

(50:23):
felt the world spinning around him in a nauseating spiral.
But he was alive. He was conscious, and he understood,
in that moment of terrible clarity that the creature had
held back that it had hit him just hard enough
to disable him, not hard enough to kill, because it
wanted him alive. It wanted him to watch. The shotgun

(50:45):
flew from his hands and skid it away into the darkness.
He tried to get up, tried to find his family,
but something wrapped around his ankle, a chain, cold iron
lynks that burned against his skin, despite the layers of
clothing between them. Burn was unlike anything Jerald had ever experienced.
It was cold and hot at the same time, freezing

(51:07):
and searing, and it seemed to reach past his flesh
and into his very soul. The chain tightened, and Gerald
felt himself being dragged across the floor, away from the fire,
away from the light, toward the shattered door and the
darkness beyond. He screamed. He screamed for Ellen, He screamed
for Marcus. He screamed for God or the Devil, or

(51:29):
anyone who might be listening to help him, to save him,
to make this nightmare end. He clawed at the floorboards
as he was dragged, his fingernails splintering and breaking as
they dug into the wood, leaving trails of blood in
his wake. No one answered, No one came. The creature
dragged him out onto the porch and down the steps

(51:50):
into the snow. Jerald clawed at the ground, his fingers
leaving furrows and the frozen earth, but it didn't slow
the creature at all. It was strong, impossibly strong, the
kind of strong that suggested it could have torn him
apart at any moment if it chose to, and the
only reason it hadn't was because it was enjoying his
terror too much. Then it stopped. Gerald lay in the snow,

(52:13):
gasping for breath, his body shaking with cold and fear.
He couldn't see the creature, but he could feel it,
could feel its presence looming over him, ancient and terrible
and utterly without mercy. And then it spoke again, not
in that guttural language from before, but in English, in
a voice that was like rocks grinding together, like ice

(52:35):
cracking on a frozen lake, like the last breath of
a dying man. It asked if Gerald had been good
this year. Gerald couldn't answer, his voice was gone, stolen
by terror, leaving him mute and helpless in the snow.
The creature laughed again, that horrible rumbling laugh that seemed
to vibrate through the earth itself. It said that it

(52:58):
already knew the answer, that it always knew. It said
that Gerald had been neither particularly good nor particularly bad,
just mediocre, just average, just another human stumbling through life
without ever really committing to anything but his son. The
creature said, his son was another matter. Gerald found his voice.

(53:20):
Then he found it and used it to beg He
begged for his son's life, promised anything, offered, anything, would
have sold his own soul a thousand times over if
it meant protecting Marcus from what was coming. The creature
was silent for a long moment. When it spoke again,
its voice had changed, softer, now, almost gentle.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
That was always a choice, that was always a bargain
to be made. The old ways demanded it. One life
for another, one soul for another, the father for the son.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Jerald didn't hesitate. He said yes. The chain around his
ankle loosened. Gerald scrambled to his feet, his heart pounding,
his mind racing. He didn't know what he had agreed to.
He didn't know what the creature would do to him,
but it didn't matter. All that mattered was that Marcus
would be safe. Ellen would be safe. They would survive

(54:17):
this night. The creature stepped out of the shadows then,
and Gerald saw it clearly for the first time. His
great uncle's journal hadn't done it justice. Nothing could have
done it justice. Words are simply inadequate to describe something
that exists so far outside the bounds of normal reality,
something that the human mind was never designed to comprehend.

(54:40):
It was taller than he had thought, nine feet at
least maybe ten. It had to stoop slightly, even in
the clearing, as if the very air of our world
was too small to contain it. Its body was covered
in fur that was matted with things Jerald didn't want
to identify. Dried blood, certainly, but also other substances, older substances,

(55:02):
things that had crusted and hardened over centuries of feeding.
Its horns curved up and back from a skull that
was almost human but wasn't, not quite. They glistened with
ice those horns, and Gerald could see markings carved into them, symbols,
the same symbols that covered the walls inside the cabin,
the same symbols that had been burned into the shed. Names.

(55:25):
He realized the horns were carved with names, the names
of everyone it had ever taken. And the face. That face,
it was, the face from the mask above the fireplace
come to terrible life, That long curved nose that swept
down past where a chin should be. Those eyes, those
horrible yellow eyes that glowed with a fire that had

(55:48):
been burning since before the first humans walked the earth.
And that grin, that impossible grin stretching across a face
that was almost human, but stretched wrong, twisted wrong, broken
in ways that went beyond the physical. Its tongue hung
from that grin, impossibly long, impossibly flexible, covered in barbs

(56:10):
that looked sharp enough to flay skin from bone. As
Gerald watched, the tongue flicked out and tasted the air,
tasted his fear, and the creature's grin somehow grew even wider.
In one massive hand, it held chains, not the chain
wrapped around Gerald's ankle, but others, dozens of them, maybe hundreds,

(56:31):
all clinking and rattling in a sound that was almost musical.
In the other hand, it held a bundle of switches,
birch rods that had been soaked in something dark, something
that steamed faintly in the cold air and on its back,
strapped in place with leather cords that looked older than civilization.
Itself was a basket, a massive wicker basket, easily large

(56:53):
enough to hold several children. Gerald could hear sounds coming
from inside it. Sounds like whimpering, sounds like crying, sounds
that might have been words, might have been pleased for help,
might have been anything at all. It held out its
hand in its palm was a contract, real paper, real ink,

(57:14):
illuminated by the glow of those terrible eyes. The paper
was made from something that wasn't quite paper, something that
had an organic quality to it, something that seemed almost
to pulse with a life of its own. The words
were in a language Gerald couldn't read, but somehow he
understood them anyway. He understood what he was agreeing to.

(57:35):
He understood the price. He understood that this was the
only way he took the contract. He pricked his finger
on one of the creature's claws, drawing blood that steamed
in the cold air. He signed his name at the
bottom of the page. The creature took back the contract.
It read over the signature, and its grin somehow grew
even wider.

Speaker 2 (57:56):
The contract is appreciated. Joe, to sacrifice yourself as been noted,
It will be remembered, but you misunderstand the nature of
the bargain. I won't want tru soon. I walked your silence.

Speaker 1 (58:13):
The creature turned and walked back toward the cabin. Gerald
tried to follow, tried to stop it, but his legs
wouldn't move. He was frozen in place, held by some
invisible force, unable to do anything but watch as the
creature climbed the porch steps and disappeared through the shattered doorway.
Then the screaming started ellen first a high, terrified shriek

(58:36):
that cut through the night like a knife. Then Marcus
calling for his father, begging for help, and Gerald could
do nothing but stand there in the snow and listen.
The sounds went on for a few short seconds, then
they stopped. The silence that followed was worse than the screaming.
Gerald stood in the snow until the sun came up.

(58:56):
He couldn't move, couldn't look away from the cabin, couldn't
do anything but wait for the invisible force holding him
to finally release its grip. When it did, he walked
toward the cabin on legs that felt like they belonged
to someone else. The front door was hanging from one hinge,
creaking in the morning breeze. Jerald stepped through it into

(59:17):
the main room. The cabin had been destroyed, furniture overturned,
walls gouged, the fire reduced to cold ashes. Blood spattered
the floors and the walls and the ceiling, more blood
than two human bodies could possibly contain. And everywhere, covering
every surface, were more of those symbols, the circle with
the horns, the grinning face. Gerald searched the cabin from

(59:41):
top to bottom. He searched the clearing around it, and
the woods beyond, and every inch of the property that
he could reach. He didn't find Ellen, he didn't find Marcus.
He found only one thing. Hanging above the fireplace, in
the same spot it had always occupied, was the mask,
But now there were two new additions hanging beside it,

(01:00:02):
two more masks, smaller, newer, carved from something that wasn't
quite wood. Gerald fell to his knees and began to scream.
Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
after these messages. The official story, the one that made
it into the newspapers and the police reports was that

(01:00:23):
Gerald Hutchins had suffered a mental breakdown while on a
family camping trip over Christmas. His wife and son had
apparently left him sometime during the night of December twenty fourth,
and Gerald, in his disturbed state, had destroyed much of
the cabin before being found by a passing hunter three
days later. The hunter, a local man named Earl Coggins,

(01:00:43):
who had been tracking a wounded deer through the winter forest,
would later tell reporters that he had never seen anything
like what he found in that clearing. The cabin looked
like it had been hit by a tornado, he said.
The front door was completely destroyed, torn off its hinges,
and scattered in pieces across the un yard. The inside
was covered in blood and what he could only describe

(01:01:04):
as claw marks, deep gouges in the wood that looked
like they had been made by something with fingers longer
and sharper than any animal he had ever seen. And
in the middle of it all, sitting in front of
the dead fireplace, was Gerald Hutchins. Earle said that Gerald
was rocking back and forth and staring at something above
the mantle, just staring, not blinking, not responding when Earle

(01:01:27):
called out to him or touched his shoulder. His eyes
were opened so wide that Earle could see the whites
all the way around, and his lips were moving constantly,
whispering something over and over again that Earle couldn't quite
make out. When the paramedics finally coaxed Gerald out of
the cabin and loaded him into the ambulance, Earle went
back inside to see what the man had been staring at.

(01:01:50):
He found the masks, the original one, the one carved
from dark wood with its too many teeth and its
hollow eyes, and the two new ones beside it. Earle
was not a superstitious man. He had lived in these
woods his whole life, had hunted and fished and camped
in places that most people couldn't even find on a map.
He had seen strange things in his time, had heard

(01:02:12):
sounds at night that didn't match any animal he knew,
had found tracks in the mud that made no sense,
and structures in the deep forest that no human hand
had built. But those masks. Earl took one look at
those masks and turned around and walked out of the
cabin and never went back. He never spoke about what
he had seen to the police, or to the reporters,

(01:02:34):
or to anyone else. He just went home and bolted
his doors and sat in his living room with his
hunting rifle across his lap until the sun came up
the next morning. And every Christmas Eve for the rest
of his life, Earl Coggins would do the same thing.
He would lock himself in his house, close all the
curtains and sit in the dark with that rifle, waiting

(01:02:55):
for dawn, waiting for whatever was out there to pass
him by. And Marcus Hutchins were never found. Despite extensive
searches and a nationwide alert, despite teams of volunteers combing
the forest for weeks, despite the most advanced tracking equipment
available in nineteen eighty six, no trace of the mother
and son ever turned up. The case eventually went cold,

(01:03:18):
filed away with thousands of other unsolved disappearances, forgotten by
everyone except the families of the missing. But there were rumors.
There were always rumors. Some of the locals whispered about
tracks found in the snow far from the cabin, tracks
that looked almost like those of a large goat, but
that were pressed deeper into the ground than any normal

(01:03:39):
animal could manage. Others spoke of sounds heard in the
forest on the nights around Christmas, sounds like chains rattling
and bells ringing, and something like laughter echoing through the trees,
and a few, a very few, claimed to have seen
something moving through the winter woods in the dead of night,
something tall and horned and impossissibly fast, something that was

(01:04:02):
carrying a basket on its back. Jerald spent the next
several years in and out of psychiatric facilities. He was
diagnosed with various conditions at various times, all of which
essentially boiled down to the same thing. He had experienced,
a traumatic event that his mind couldn't process, and the
delusions he described the creature with the horns and the hoofs,

(01:04:25):
the demon that had taken his family, were just his
psyche's way of avoiding a truth too terrible to accept.
Gerald knew better. He knew that what had happened in
that cabin was real. He knew that the thing that
had taken his wife and son was not a figment
of his imagination, or a manifestation of guilt, or any
of the other explanations his doctors tried to give him.

(01:04:47):
It was real, and it was still out there, and
every Christmas Eve it came back to hunt. He tried
to warn people. He wrote letters to newspapers and called
in to radio shows, and stood on street corners with
signs that said things like crampis is real and keep
your children inside on Christmas Eve. Most people ignored him,
a few laughed. Some took pictures and shared them on

(01:05:10):
the Internet years later, using them as examples of what
happens when someone goes off the deep end. Jerald died
in the winter of two thousand and three. He was
found in his small apartment on the morning of December
twenty sixth, sitting in a chair facing the window, a
blanket pulled up to his chin. The official cause of
death was heart failure, but the coroner noted that the

(01:05:32):
expression on his face suggested he had seen something in
his final moments, something that had frightened him, something that
had made him smile. The apartment was cleaned out by
the state. Since Gerald had no living relatives willing to
claim his possessions. Most of it was thrown away, but
a few items found their way to a local thrift store.

(01:05:52):
Old clothes, some books, a wooden box containing papers that
no one bothered to read. And a mask, a sink
mask carved from dark wood, depicting a face that was
almost human but stretched wrong, a face with a nose
that curved down like a beak, and eyes that were
hollow sockets, and a mouth that contained far too many teeth.

(01:06:15):
The mask was purchased by a young couple who thought
it would make an interesting conversation piece for their cabin,
their cabin in the mountains, their cabin in South Carolina.
They planned to spend Christmas there. Now I know what
you're thinking. You're thinking that this is just a story,
a campfire tale meant to give you chills on a
cold December night, a piece of fiction designed to remind

(01:06:38):
you that the darkness outside your window might not be
as empty as you think. And you might be right.
Maybe I made the whole thing up. Maybe Gerald Hutchins
never existed. Maybe there was never a cabin in South Carolina,
never a family that disappeared on Christmas Eve, never a
creature with horns and hoofs that hunts the naughty children

(01:06:58):
when the nights grow long and the cold old settles in. Maybe,
but then again, maybe not, Because here's the thing. About
the old stories, the ones that have been passed down
through countless generations, the ones that predate Christianity and civilization
and maybe even humanity itself. They don't survive because they're entertaining.

(01:07:18):
They don't get told and retold for thousands of years
because people enjoy a good scare. They survive because they're true.
Not literally true, perhaps not true in the way that
historical facts are true, but true in a deeper sense,
true in the sense that they describe something real, something
that exists in the shadows and the forests and the

(01:07:39):
dark places of the world, something that has always existed
and always will exist, no matter how many street lights
we build, or how bright we make our cities, or
how much we try to convince ourselves that we've outgrown
the need for fear. Crampis is one of those stories
in the old countries. They knew this. They knew that
the winter was a dangerous time, a time when the

(01:08:01):
barriers between worlds grew thin, and things that normally stayed
hidden came out to walk among humans. They knew that
the price of survival was vigilance, was caution, was respect
for the powers that lurked beyond the firelight. They knew
that some children were taken, They knew that some families
didn't make it through the longest nights. And they knew

(01:08:22):
that the creature responsible wasn't a myth or a legend
or a story told to frighten children into behaving. It
was real. It is real, and it is still out there.
Every December, as the solstice approaches and the days grow
short and the darkness stretches its fingers across the land,
Crampis awakens. It leaves whatever hell it calls home, and

(01:08:44):
ventures forth into our world, hunting for those who have
been naughty, searching for those who have earned its attention.
Most years it finds someone. Most years, somewhere in the world,
a child goes missing on Christmas Eve. A family disappears
without explain nation. A cabin in the woods is found empty,
its doors broken, its walls covered in symbols that no

(01:09:06):
one wants to look at too closely. Most years we
explain it away. We blame it on accidents or criminals,
or the simple tragedy of life in a random and
uncaring universe. But some of us know better. Some of
us remember the old stories. Some of us still leave
the chains and the switches by the door on Christmas Eve,
offerings to appease something that cannot truly be appeased, but might,

(01:09:30):
if we're lucky, pass us by in favor of easier prey.
And some of us, on the longest night of the
year stay inside with the doors locked, and the fire's
burning and the light's blazing, and we wait for the
dawn because we know what's out there, we know what's hunting,
and we know that no matter how good we've been,
no matter how pure our hearts or how kind our deeds,

(01:09:53):
there's always a chance that tonight might be the night.
Tonight might be the night when Crampus comes calling. So
here's my advice to you friends, as you settle in
for your Christmas celebrations. Enjoy your presence, drink your eggnog,
sing your carols, and kiss beneath the missiletoe, and tell
yourselves that there's nothing to fear. But maybe just maybe

(01:10:16):
leave a candle burning in the window. Maybe keep the
fire going all through the night. And if you hear
something on the roof that sounds too heavy to be reindeer,
if you hear bells that ring with a sound that's
somehow wrong. If you see shadows moving outside your window
in ways that shadows shouldn't move, don't open the door,
don't look outside. And whatever you do, whatever happens, whatever

(01:10:39):
you hear, don't say his name, because names have power,
and some things are always listening. Sweet dreams, everyone, and
merry Christmas from all of us here in the dark. Now.
Normally this is where i'd wrap things up, tell you
to stay safe out there, wish you a merry Christmas,
and send you on your way. But that's not the

(01:11:01):
end of this story. You see. While I was putting
this episode together, something strange happened. I found a file
on my computer that I don't remember, creating a recording
just a few minutes long. And when I played it back, well,
I'll let you hear for yourself. I don't know how
this got here, I don't know who or what left it,

(01:11:23):
but I think it's meant for you. So listen closely,
and remember he knows if you've been bad or good.

Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
You think this is just a story, How precious You
sit there in your warm little homes with your twinkling
lights and your wrapped presence, and you tell yourself that
I am nothing but a legend, a fairy tale, a
quaint old tradition from a country you've never visited, meant

(01:11:53):
to frighten children into behaving. You're wrong. I was ancient
when the earth was new. I walk to the frozen
forests of this world, when your ancestors still huddled in
caves and prayed to gods whose names have been forgotten.
I have always been here. I will always be here.

(01:12:15):
Long after your cities crumble and your language is faint,
and your species is nothing but bones in the earth,
I will remain, and I will still be hungry. You
think you're safe because you're an adult now, because you've
outgrown the fear of monsters in the dark. Let me

(01:12:36):
tell you something, little one. I don't only take children.
I take the wicked. I take the cruel. I take
the ones who lie and cheat and hurt others and
tell themselves it doesn't matter. I take the ones who
think no one is watching. But I am always watching.

(01:12:58):
Right now, as you listen to this, I want you
to think about the past year. Think about every unkind word,
every selfish act, every moment when you chose the wrong
path because you thought no one would know. I know,
I have always known. Can you hear that that faint

(01:13:22):
sound in the distance, that jingling, rattling sound that could
be sleigh bells? But isn't that sound that's getting closer,
just a little bit closer with every passing moment. That's
me coming to check my list. So go ahead, lock

(01:13:43):
your doors, leave your lights on, do whatever makes you
feel safe. It won't matter. It never matters. When I
decide to visit, nothing keeps me out. But don't worry.
Not every one receives a visit from Old Crampers. Most

(01:14:04):
of you will wake up on Christmas morning with nothing
worse than a hangover and a credit card bill. Most
of you will never see my face except in your nightmares.
Most of you, but some of you. Some of you
know exactly why I'm speaking to you right now. Some
of you feel that cold finger running down your spine

(01:14:28):
because you know what you've done. You know the darkness
in your own heart. You know that if anyone deserves
a visit from me, it's you. Sweet dreams, little ones.
I'll be seeing you soon. And remember when you hear
the chains rattling and the hoofs on your roof, and

(01:14:49):
that sound, that horrible sound of something laughing in the dark.
Don't bother running. It only makes the hunt more enter hay,
foolish of vine not and Merry Christmas.

Speaker 1 (01:15:56):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (01:16:17):
In l the spa is the Nepa pigo